Authors, &c. B

Byron, George Gordon, Lord [1788–1824]. [works]

Byron—his life and works—had perhaps the single greatest influence on the writing of the Brontës. His aristocratic background, liberal views, and unconventional life captured the imaginations of the adolescent Brontës and engendered not only a sexual and psychological complexity in the heroes of their early writings, but helped to inspire the complex characters of two of the Brontës’ most famous fictional heroes: Heathcliff and Rochester. …

By the time the Brontës entered the market in the early 1830s, there was a thriving trade in pirate and cheap Continental editions, like the pocket copy of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage … that Branwell Brontë owned. There was also a prosperous second-hand market for the earlier expensive volumes, plus remaindered unsold new stocks. It is possible that Revd Patrick Brontë’s edition of Byron’s works came from such a source, given his low income, or it might equally have been one of the many volumes of Byron’s collected works advertised by Parisian publishers ‘at a third to an eighth of London prices’ (William St Clair, ‘The Impact of Byron’s Writings’, in Andrew Rutherford (ed.), Byron: Augustan and Romantic, 1990). The sale catalogue of Mr Brontë’s effects (BPM) simply cites ‘Books Byrons’ and there is no evidence in Winifred Gérin’s statement that he owned the Complete Works (1833) ed. Thomas Moore (‘Byron’s Influence on the Brontës’, Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin, 17 (1966)). Furthermore, no single edition of Byron before 1839 contained all six of the plates copied by the Brontës; nor were they all to be found in Thomas Moore’s Letters and Journals of Lord Byron: With Notices of his Life (commonly known as his Life of Byron). The Brontës’ edition is unlikely to have been illustrated and … they probably bought or had access (at school or elsewhere) to a series of engravings in one of the many ‘Byron Galleries’ bound separately from the editions themselves … [Art, 16-17.] (Oxford Companion, 113.)

PBB, The Politics of Verdopolis (1834):

A young Lady, whom Sir Robert [Pelham] instantly recognized as Miss M Percy turning round a corner appeared before him. She knew not. of the vicinity of any one. and happened to be reading. She looked up. But bowed, without, any confussion. … What does your Nation think of Lord Byron. My Nation. Madam are frightened at him they could not understand him he was to much. of. a—a Glasstowner for our comprehension, for my self I knew him. and could. appreciate him. Miss Percys eye lighted up rather when she found. that Sir Robert had been personaly acquainted with one whose works she admired. Did you know him. Sir? My Father has once or twice. on looking at his works affirmed that he was born for our country. and died. because he did not stand in his natural soil. you are too proud. of. your poet Sir. look at this one’ Miss Percy gave to him an exquisitly bound, little doudecimo. … it was a volumn of the poems of. Arthur Marquis of Douro. Hah. Madam. I know we must bow to this one. He is above us. Byron Himself— must fail before him you would say. yes. yet they are like each other. (WPBB, I, 350–351.)

CB, ‘High Life in Verdopolis’ (1834), Chapter III:

There she [Mary, Duchess of Zamorna] glided before me, through the changing lights and shadows of a long plane tree avenue. As simple, as elegant, as fair, as unsophisticated as when, with Byron’s poems in her hand, she first met Sir Robert Pelham and commenced that acquaintance which had nearly terminted in matrimony. (EEW, II/2, 37.)

CB to EN, 4 July 1834:

Now Ellen don’t be startled at the names of Shakespeare, and Byron. Both these were great Men and their works are like themselves, You will know how to chuse the good and avoid the evil, the finest passages are always the purest, the bad are invariably revolting you will never wish to read them over twice, Omit the Comedies of Shakespeare and the Don Juan, perhaps the Cain of Byron though the latter is a magnificent Poem and read the rest fearlessly … (LCB, I, 130.)

CB, ‘Caroline Vernon’ (1839):

‘… he [Zamorna] thinks reading Lord Byron has half turned my head.’

‘You do read Lord Byron, then?’

‘Yes, indeed I do; and Lord Byron and Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and Lord Edward Fitzgerald are the four best men that ever lived.’ (TA, 370.)

See also: Karen Sevareid, ‘The Byronic Woman’

*——. ‘The Adieu’ (1807) [Occasional Pieces, 1807–1824], first publ. in Miscellanies, Vol. III (1832)

Cf. Stanza 9, ll. 7–10:

My life a short and vulgar dream:
Lost in the dull, ignoble crowd,
My hopes recline within a shroud,
My fate is Lethe’s stream.

To PBB’s ‘Thomas Bewick’ (1842):

… it was left for the only land that knows what nature means [i.e. Britain], to find that “the country” was productive of something more than pastoral shepherds and shepherdesses; that mighty ideas did not need for their elucidation sounding words; … —nor are the breathing masses of humanity round us merely the “vain ignoble crowd;” we can now find something to muse on in the humble daisy, and something to see on a desolate moor. (WPBB, III, 400.)

*——. Inscription on the Monument to a Newfoundland Dog (Written 1808; first publ. in Hobhouse’s Imitations and Translations, 1809, 190–191 and The Corsair: A Tale, 1814, 69–70.)

CB obviously had Byron’s Newfoundland Boatswain in mind when she named Rochester’s dog, of the same breed and description, Pilot. (The same goes for his horse, Mesrour—Byron’s was called Sultan.

Michael Davies writes:

The appearance of Pilot at this point in Jane Eyre does indeed indicate the novel’s overarching Byronism but what this comparison serves to illuminate most clearly is not just Mr Rochester’s Byronic stature, but Jane’s. For it is Jane, and not Rochester, who finally shares and articulates more thoroughly, though more quietly, the poem’s radicalism and its rejection of human worldliness, along with a desire for liberty from restraints that enchain, enslave, and demean men and women – lust, hypocrisy, deceit, power, and exclusive religion. It is Jane who expresses and exemplifies the political ideology of Byron’s Inscription – that of freedom from human slavery.

The intertextual significance of Pilot in Jane Eyre signals, therefore, much more than just the appearance of Rochester as the novel’s resident Byronic hero, but (as Gilbert and Gubar have likewise noted) of Jane as Brontë’s properly Byronic heroine – and a much more subtle, profound, and radical one than Rochester. (Michael Davies, Bron­të’s Pilot and Byron’s Boatswain: Jane Eyre and The Inscription on the Monu­ment of a Newfoundland Dog, The Byron Journal, 31 (2003), 84–90: 88.)

——. ‘To Ianthe’ [Dedication of Childe Harold’s Pilgimage], The Literary Souvenir for 1830, 96–97.

——. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. 1812–1818

There was a sound of revelry by night
And Belgium’s capital had gather’d then
Her Beauty and her Chivalry, and bright
The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men;

—Canto III, xxi

Cf. CB, ‘High Life in Verdopolis’ (Feb.–March 1834), Chapter I:

A gladder day usurped the place of night
For Africa’s capital had gathered then
Her beauty and her chivalry, and bright
The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men.

(EEW, II/2, 4.)

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The sky is changed!—and such a change! O night,
And storm, and darkness, ye are wondrous strong …

—Canto, III, xcii

Cf. ‘High Life in Verdopolis’, Chapter IV: ‘What in the name of night and storm and darkness brought you from Tamworth to this desert place. (EEW, II/2, 50.)

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Canto II, vii is quoted (with some inaccuracies) in PBB’s [‘Angria and the Angrians’], II(g) (1836):

… He might cut his Neighbours throat. it would be predestined it would be from his natural conformation or natural feeling of malice and anger Therefore it would be right. Such philosophy could not Stand the. test for a month and then Paley was unanswerable Christianity must be true if so so must the Bible It teaches widly different doctrines from these therefore these must be wrong—But again who could surmount predestination He must do what he must do—at last he cried with the noble poet

Well didst thou speak Athene’s wisest son
All that we know is, nothing can be known
Why should we shrink from what we cannot shun
Each has his pang but feeble sufferers groan
With brain born dreams of evil all their own
Pursue what fate or chance proclaimeth the best
Peace waits us on the shores of Acheron
Where no forced banquet claims the sated guest
But silence spreads its couch of ever lasting rest.

Following this most mistaken advice Mr Wentworth determined upon a visit to Verdopolis there to see its pleasures and dissipation and wild approaching turmoil the good which fate and chance should hold out to him (WPBB, II, 533.)

Source: WPBB, II, 533.

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Did ye not hear it?—No; ’twas but the wind,
Or the car rattling o’er the stony street;

—Canto III, xxii, 1–2

Cf. JE, I, v: ‘… and away we rattled over the “stony street” of L—.’ (JEOUP, 42.)

——. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Paris, 1827

Copy in the BPM (bb15); inscribed on the flyleaf: ‘P. B. Brontë / Liverpool / Saturday / May 30th / 1835.’ — Source: BoB

* ——. The Giaour. London. 1813

He who hath bent him o’er the dead
Ere the first day of death is fled
The first dark day of nothingness,
The last of danger and distress

ll. 68–71

Cf. ‘High Life in Verdopolis’ (1834), Chapter II:

‘But Arthur, I could have no sympathy with beings brighter or more glorious than you; I might dread, perhaps admire, but not love them.’

Don’t fear that you will ever be put to the proof,’ said the voice of North­anger­land, who had joined them unobserved. ‘The grave, corruption, anni­hi­lat­ion, are the only followers of death. Mary, you see in Zamorna and myself the perfection of created things. … Look then, look earnestly, look long. No fairer, no nobler spectacle will ever be presented to your gaze. Dreamers think otherwise, but I say “the first dark day of nothingness” comes after the heart is still and the eye glazed for ever.’ (EEW, II/2, 32.)

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Go—and with Gouls and Afrits rave;
Till these in horror shrink away
From spectre more accursed than they!

ll. 784–786.

Cf. CB’s ‘Editor’s Preface to the New Edition of Wuthering Heights’ (1850):

These solitary traits omitted, we should say [Heathcliff] was child neither of Lascar nor gipsy, but a man’s shape animated by demon life—a Ghoul—an Afreet. (xviii.)

Cf. WH, I, x:

‘I like her [Isabella] too well, my dear Heathcliff, to let you absolutely seize and devour her up.’

‘And I like her too ill to attempt it,’ said he, ‘except in a very ghoulish fashion. You’d hear of odd things, if I lived alone with that mawkish, waxen face … ’ (239.)

‘Is he a ghoul, or a vampire?’, Nelly muses in WH, II, xx (397).

* ——. The Bride of Abydos: A Turkish Tale. 1813

Know ye the land of the cedar and vine?
Where the flowers ever blossom, the beams ever shine,
Where the light wings of Zephyr, oppressed with perfume,
Wax faint o’er the gardens of Gúl in her bloom;

Canto I, i, 5–8

Cf. ‘High Life in Verdopolis’ (1834), Chapter III:

‘Noble Ilderim, said she as, with the grace and state proper to her royal rank, she performed this menial office, ‘our prophet’s proudest descendant, do you not think that the west wind now blowing towards us is like

The light wings of Zephyr oppressed with perfume
That sigh through the Gardens of Gul in their bloom?’

‘Light of my eyes,’ replied the Duke, ‘my lovely Zulma, the breath of this wind is sweet, but not like that which sweeps over the rose gardens of Suristan. (EEW, II/2, 41.)

* ——. The Corsair. 1814

Cf. Blanche Ingram in JE, II, ii: ‘Here then is a Corsair-song. Know that I doat on Corsairs …’ (JEOUP, 182.) and JE, II, iii: ‘An English hero of the road would be the next best thing to an Italian bandit; and that could only be surpassed by a Levantine pirate.’ (JEOUP, 186.)

——. ‘Jeptha’s Daughter’, [Hebrew Melodies. 1815 – music by Carl Löwe], ML, Vocal (I), 22–24.

* ——. ‘The Dream’. Domestic Pieces. 1816

‘A change comes o’er the spirit of our dream’ quoted in CB’s [Lines on Bewick] (1832), l. 29 and ‘High Life in Verdopolis’ (1834), Ch. III (EEW, II/2, 34.) — Source: EEW, II/2, 34.

Together with the description of Byron’s unrequited love for Mary Chaworth in Moore’s Life of Byron this autobiographical poem may have had some influence on WH. As John Hewish notes, it contains elements that are not mentioned in Moore. Like Heathcliff, when his beloved is going to marry to another man, the ‘Boy’ of the poem leaves without a word and disappears into foreign lands.

The Boy was sprung to manhood: in the wilds
Of fiery climes he made himself a home,
And his soul drank their sunbeams: he was girt
With strange and dusky aspects; he was not
Himself like what he had been; on the sea
And on the shore he was a wanderer: …

Like Catherine, the woman of the poem becomes mentally ill, and the man’s life ends in loneliness:

         her mind
Had wander’d from its dwelling, and her eyes
They had not their own lustre, but the look
Which is not of the earth; she was become
The queen of a fantastic realm; her thoughts
Were combinations of disjointed things;
And forms impalpable and unperceived
Of others’ sight familiar were to hers.
And this the world calls frenzy; but the wise
Have a far deeper madness, and the glance
Of melancholy is a fearful gift;
What is it but the telescope of truth?
Which strips the distance of its fantasies,
And brings life near in utter nakedness,
Making the cold reality too real!
…
The Wanderer was alone as heretofore,
The beings which surrounded him were gone,
Or were at war with him; he was a mark
For blight and desolation, compass’d round
With Hatred and Contention; Pain was mix’d
In all which was served up to him, …
… with the stars
And the quick Spirit of the Universe
He held his dialogues …
…
It was of a strange order, that the doom
Of these two creatures should be thus traced out
Almost like a reality – the one
To end in madness – both in misery.

— Source: Hewish, 131–2; [with a reference to Ann Lapraik Livermore, Byron and Emily Brontë, The Quarterly Review, CCC: 3 (Jan. 1962), 337–344.]

Cf. also the reflexion on dreams in the first part of the poem …

Our life is twofold: Sleep hath its own world,
A boundary between the things misnamed
Death and existence: Sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality.
And dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy;
…
They do divide our being; they become
A portion of ourselves as of our time,
…
They make us what we were not—what they will …

… to WH, I, ix.

* ——. ‘A Sketch’. 1816

ll. 55 and 56 are quoted by CB in ‘A Word to the Quarterly’ (29 Aug. 1849):

In the second place, you [i. e. Elizabeth Rigby] … breathe a suspicion that Currer Bell, “for some sufficient reason” (Ah! Madam:

“Skilled by a touch to deepen Scandal’s tints
With all the kind mendacity of hints.”)

“for some sufficient reason” has long forfeited the society of your sex. In this passage—Madam—we discover an undoubted Mare’s nest … (LCB, II, 242.)

— Source: LCB, II, 245.

* ——. Manfred. A Dramatic Poem. 1817

Manfred was reviewed with excerpts in BM, I (June 1817), 289–295.

Oh, that I were
The viewless spirit of a lovely sound,
A living voice, a breathing harmony,
A bodiless enjoyment—born and dying
With the blest tone which made me!

I, ii, 53–57.

Cf. CB’s ‘The Duke of Zamorna’ (1838): ‘“Brummell may be a name, for ought I know,” replied the viewless spirit of some sweet sound, “but it is certainly not my name. … ”’ (TA, 150.) — Source: TA, 490.

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Speak to me! though it be in wrath;—but say—
I reck not what—but let me hear thee once—
This once—once more!

II, iv, 147–149.

Cf. WH, II, ii and I, iii:

… haunt me, then! … Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! (WHOUP, 167.)

“Come in! come in!” he sobbed. “Cathy, do come. Oh do—once more! … hear me this time— … (WHOUP, 27.)

Source: WHOUP, 343, 352; WGEB, 46.

Cf. also Shakespeare, Macbeth, III, iv.

* R ——. Mazeppa. 1819 [reviewed in BM, V (July 1819), 429–439.]

X, 418–422 is quoted in CB’s ‘Henry Hastings’ (1839):

If Northangerland be dead I’ll apotheize his memory. Let my bloody-handed foes remember that

‘If we do but watch the hour,
There never yet was human power
That could evade, if unforgiven,
The patient search and vigil long
Of him who treaures up a wrong.’

(TA, 235.)

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Their troop came hard upon our back,
With their long gallop, which can tire
The hounds deep hate, and hunter’s fire.

XII, 494–496.

Cf. ‘Henry Hastings’:

Well, when Hastings is down there’s a wild-boar chase to come on, and then a wolf-hunt, and after that a bull-baiting. Simpson and Montmorency and Macqueen are every one marked. We’ll keep on their track; their

Long gallop shall never tire
The hound’s deep hate, and hunter’s fire.

(TA, 237.)

Source: TA, 506.

——. Don Juan. 1819–1824

CB to EN, 4 July 1834: ‘Omit … the Don Juan, perhaps the Cain of Byron …’ (LCB, I, 130.)

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Between two worlds life hovers like a star,
’Twixt night and morn, upon the horizon’s verge.
How little do we know that which we are!
How less what we may be! The eternal surge
Of time and tide rolls on, and bears afar
Our bubbles; as the old burst, new emerge,
Lash’d from the foam of ages …

—XVI, xcix

ll. 3–4 are quoted slightly incorrectly by AB in her 1841 Diary Paper:

How little know we what we are
How less what we may be!

Four years ago I was at school. Since then I have been a governess at Blake Hall, left it, come to Thorp Green … Tabby has left us. … … We have got Keeper, got a sweet little cat and lost it … What will the next four years bring forth? Providence only knows. (LCB, I, 264.)

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ll. 1–4 of canto I, ccxiv are quoted in PBB to J. B. Leyland, [24 January 1847]:

I shall never be able to realize the too sanguine hopes of my friends, for at 28 I am a thouroughly old man—mentally and bodily—Far more so indeed than I am willing to express. God knows I do not scribble like a poetaster when I quote Byron’s terribly truthful words—

“No more, no more, oh! never more on me
The freshness of the heart shall fall like dew,
Which, out of all the lovely things we see
Extracts emotions beautiful and new!”

LCB, I, 513.

— Source: LCB, I, 514.

——. Cain. A Mystery. 1821

CB to EN, 4 July 1834: ‘Omit … the Don Juan, perhaps the Cain of Byron though the latter is a magnificent Poem … ’ (LCB, I, 130.)

R(*) ——. Werner. A Tragedy. 1822 [reviewed as ‘Odoherty on Werner’ and ‘Tickler on Werner’, BM, (Dec. 1822), 710–719 and 782–785.]

Barker notes that the name of PBB’s character ‘Werner’ in ‘The Revenge: a Tragedy’ (1830) may have been taken from Byron’s drama. — Source: Barker, 867.

See also Werner, Zacharias and Lee, Harriet.

——. ‘The Kiss, Dear Maid! Thy Lip Has Left’ [‘On Parting’], [music by Felix Mendelssohn-​Bartholdy], ML, Vocal (I), 11.

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